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New: Marketing technology buyer's forums from ClickZ

Marketers now spend 33% of their budget on new technologies and with the landscape growing from just 150 tracked marketing technologies in 2011 to over 5,000 in 2017, it has become almost impossible to determine which technologies are right for you. Thankfully, our new series of technology Buyers Guides and Forums are here to help! First up... Bid Management Tools.

On Wednesday January 31, ClickZ will host the first in a series of Buyers Forums in New York in partnership with its sister site Search Engine Watch. Due to be followed by a similar event in London on February 21, the inaugural Buyers Forum will see the launch of the ClickZ Buyers Guide to Bid Management Tools.

This series of buyers guides are intended to facilitate better decisions from senior marketers when evaluating technology platforms. The marketing technology space is more advanced and crowded than ever, with 33% of marketing budgets now spent on technology.

The stakes are high and it can be difficult to find an objective opinion on which vendors provide the best product for a marketer’s specific requirements.

That is exactly why we have decided to create our buyer’s guides, which are driven by the collective knowledge held in the ClickZ and Search Engine Watch communities.

The Buyers guides will reveal the results from our community surveys, along with expert opinions from ClickZ and Search Engine Watch. Our aim is to provide a useful and insightful guide that will help brands identify the vendors that can help them meet their business objectives.

The complimentary Buyers Forums are an opportunity to meet and discuss the findings, which will be presented on the day. They will also create an excellent opportunity to network with fellow marketers and reflect on the challenges that technology can help us overcome.

Our first Buyers Forum in New York on January 31 will showcase the guide to bid management tools and will be presented by Clark Boyd, industry expert and former Director at iProspect UK.

$92.4 billion was spent on paid search worldwide in 2017, a number that looks set to increase this year as Google launches new audience-driven advertising options, and both Amazon and Pinterest enter the fray.

The role of a bid management platform has evolved significantly in line with the industry’s level of sophistication. Advertisers use these software packages to get more out of their paid media budgets, starting with their ability to manage budgets to campaign KPI’s in a more effective and efficient manner than AdWords alone can achieve.

The vendors we assessed all showed advanced capabilities in the core areas of bid management and analytics, with more marked variations shown in the scoring for strategic insight and cross-channel capabilities.

Notably, technologies that began life as AdWords-focused products have expanded their remit and most now offer Facebook management, while some cover everything from video ads to programmatic TV buying.